https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/12/11/consumers-go-cold-automated-chatbots-finds-acquia-research" Widespread dissatisfaction with the service provided by chatbots has done nothing to dent the enthusiasm of marketers, with 80% of CMOs either already using the technology or planning to do so by 2020 according to a separate Oracle survey."I played around with chatbots and smart chatbots a couple years back. I still lived in California when a friend and I thought about a health and wellness chatbot for new and expecting parents. Never figured the monetary business model for it though and it was early stages before things like dialogflow basically abstracted away natural language processing (NLP). It was interesting how you had to come up with a natural conversation flow script. Otherwise it be kind of a dumb chatbot like we had in the early 90s. Fast forward to the world of Alexa and Google home and Siri and even my kids call Alexa dumb. At least Google hole explores the…

https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-developers-are-quietly-planning-an-accelerated-tech-roadmap Interesting possibilities in 2019. But accelerated roadmaps and timelines make sense If more developers are involved, otherwise it's a system already with vulnerabilities probably adding more because they want speed over quality. Happens all the time everywhere, but not always good thing. The other interesting tidbit is renting costs for the storage of smart contracts. I understand why they need to do it. 1TB isn't something most people are going to want to download as a miner or eventual staker. But if you build a dapp and have to pay digitalocean for the front end web mobile app portion; then pay for gas; and pay for storj or ipfs for regular file storage; and then pay to rent space for your smart contract ... At some point it's an expensive experiment and gets into why would anybody build real applications on it ? Most companies and startups aren't going to benefi…

https://www.coindesk.com/deloitte-blockchain-chief-bad-crypto-headlines-are-making-clients-nervous" If you’re building free proofs of concept, but you’re missing the business context around it, like regulatory, AML/KYC, tax and all the other stuff, you really aren’t servicing the client holistically,” Pawczuk went on, without naming names. “Another thing that makes me nervous is proofs-of-concepts being built by students that have never had to coexist in the environment where large high volume transaction systems do exist. Blockchain does not replace all core systems.”I find it rather interesting the leaders and partners of these Consulting companies are worried about students and newbies doing POCs, yet many of the big firms like Deloitte are people under 27 who aren't usually hardcore techies and computer science or Cryptography guys. The big shot partners usually don't know anything about the latest tech. They are good at selling it , but dig into technical conversa…